Monthly Archives: December 2011

I blog, I think. I want to blog. Somebody help me figure this whole thing out.

Today, I would love to tell you about my tiny Christmas tree, which turns out is a story about getting married. The tiny Christmas tree isn’t mine, you see. Or it wasn’t mine. It was my darling husband’s, and now that we are married, I guess it is a little bit mine too.

It stands approximately three feet tall and is surrounded by a red tree skirt that is so small that it was almost immediately obscured by our Christmas presents from his parents. When you plug it in, in lights up obligingly in white. We have decorated it with ornaments both average-sized (which look enormous) and tiny (which look just right).

Sometimes people tell us that this is our “first Christmas,” because we got married in January. That tends to not be my favorite thing that people say (it’s not like we met yesterday), but they mean well, and there is some truth to it. It is the first Christmas in which we are married. In is the first time we will spend it together, and it will be with one of our families. It’s the first time we are our own family, and there certainly is something special about that. For one, I get a tiny Christmas tree, which is adorable, and keeps me appreciating what it is we have together.

Our apartment is essentially a modified studio, so there is not room for a big ole tree. This is a downside to living in the city, but for me, right now, it’s worth it. We have our little apartment, which holds everything we own (except Rosie the Mini, who lives outside), we have enough furniture and enough room to store the food we need. We may not have a bedroom door, and it’s possible that you can see every inch of the apartment from every other inch, but you know what, there is room for our tiny Christmas tree.

This is the optimistic perspective, and I try to hold on to it. But sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes, in our baby marriage, we get sad because it seems like we aren’t there yet. That we are two grown-up married people who live under a tiny roof and just scrape by. That we don’t have the financial security to get a bigger place just yet, or do many of the things we want to do. And that can be tough, to look around and not quite have the life that we want. Despite our possession of one small Christmas tree.

But this is the point where I get to keep telling myself that what I have is enough. That I shouldn’t lament being young and broke and still in grad school. That it’s easy to wish for someone else’s life, someone else’s job, someone else’s bedroom door. It’s even easy to look at other people’s relationships and want what I think they have, which is silly, because I don’t really know what they have. I think it anyway. But those kinds of thoughts are not what it’s about. There is a tiny Christmas tree twinkling away in my living room, and for all the world, it does not need to be eight feet tall. It’s perfect.

Someday, I have no doubt that we will have many of the things that seem out of reach, but for now, it’s just you, me, and our tiny Christmas tree. Some days, I get it. And I couldn’t be happier.